When he took office, President Joe Biden made a sweeping pledge to defend transgender Americans from Republican policies that portrayed them as a danger to children and attempted to exclude them from public life.
In his first State of the Union speech in 2021, Biden reassured transgender people that their president had their back. He reiterated this claim in further talks.
However, some are concerned that Biden did not do enough to protect transgender people from what is expected to happen, especially since President-elect Donald Trump is just days away from assuming office after slapping on transgender people during his campaign.
In addition to promising to sign a number of executive orders targeting transgender individuals early in his term, the president-elect has stated that the United States government will officially adopt the stance that there are only two genders: male and female.
Meanwhile, Biden and Democrats are struggling with transgender politics after the GOP regained control of Congress and the White House by exploiting Democrats’ support for the trans community. Although Vice President Kamala Harris made few references to transgender individuals throughout her campaign, Trump’s team utilized Harris’s earlier remarks to vehemently convince swing voters that she was more concerned with transgender problems than the economy.
The catchphrase of a Trump commercial that became viral by election day will stick in the minds of Democrats for a long time: President Trump is for you, Kamala is for they/them.
During his final month in office, Biden signed a law that includes language that excludes coverage of transgender medical treatments for service members’ children and canceled plans to give protections for transgender student-athletes.
His actions follow a regular pattern whereby the departing administration abandons unfinished rules or pushes through measures to keep the new president from retooling them to further his own agenda more rapidly. However, some transgender people wonder why Biden neglected initiatives that could have better shielded them from Trump’s policies.
According to Imara Jones, a transgender woman who founded The Anti-Trans Hate Machine podcast, the Biden administration has partially fulfilled its pledges to support transgender people, but not nearly as much as they could have or as much as the current anti-trans campaign, she told The Associated Press.
She pointed out that Biden appointed transgender individuals to high-level positions during his administration. He allowed U.S. citizens who do not identify as male or female to choose an X as the gender marking on their passports, overturning a Trump-era ban on transgender individuals serving in the military.
White House spokesperson Kelly Scully stated, “Under President Biden’s leadership, we have addressed historical injustices and improved equality for the community, but there is still more work to be done, and we hope that work continues after he leaves office.”
Under Biden, the Justice Department also filed declarations of interest in other instances and contested state laws that prohibited gender-affirming medical care for trans minors in Alabama and Tennessee.
However, Jones noted that there are still significant holes that have been opened. The government failed to appropriately combat anti-trans violence, defend trans health care, and implement Title IX. The list is endless. The government may already be taking steps to protect the trans community, at least temporarily.
Some LGBTQ advocates have accused Biden of abandoning the transgender community after he signed into law the annual defense bill despite his objections to a provision preventing the military s health program from covering certain medical treatments for transgender children in military families.
The nation s largest organization of LGBTQ service members and veterans said Biden s decision to sign the bill is in direct opposition to claims that his administration is the most pro-LGBTQ+ in American history.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said it s the first federal law targeting LGBTQ people since the 1990s, when Congress adopted the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed it into law, a decision he later said he regretted.
The restriction comes as at least 26 states have adopted laws banning or limiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors, though most face lawsuits. Federal judges have struck down the bans in Arkansas and Florida as unconstitutional, but a federal appeals court has stayed the Florida ruling. A judge s order is in place temporarily blocking enforcement of a ban in Montana.
Twenty-five states have laws on the books barring trans women and girls from competing in certain women s sports competitions. Judges have temporarily blocked the enforcement of bans in Arizona, Idaho and Utah.
When Biden in 2023 introduced his now-abandoned proposal to forbid outright bans on transgender student-athletes, trans rights advocates were dissatisfied, saying it left room for individual schools to prevent some athletes from playing on teams consistent with their gender identity.
The sports proposal, meant as a follow-up to a broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ students under Title IX, was then delayed several times.
The delays from Biden were widely viewed as a political maneuver during an election year as Republicans generated outcry about trans athletes in girls sports. Had the rule been finalized, it would likely have faced conservative legal challenges like those that prevented the broader Title IX policy from taking effect in dozens of states.
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